In June 2012, I wrote an editorial for the data junkies and people who wanted to get a snapshot of the data we have about Clarkesworld. Since then, I’ve received numerous requests to reprise the research as an annual “year in review.” As we’ve just finished up our seventh year of publication, I thought this would be a good time to look back at that year. Unless otherwise specified, all of the information below is based on data collected between October 2012 and September 2013.

Where the Stories Come From

Unlike our early days, the majority of the stories we publish are unsolicited and submitted to us via an online form. This is commonly referred to as the slush pile. In year seven, we received 9241 stories and of those, we purchased thirty-two, an acceptance rate of 0.35%. On average, authors received a response from us in less than three days.

Despite the slush pile favoring men 71% to 29%, 65% of the purchased stories were written by women. In our seventh year, we published thirty-six stories—some were purchased outside this window or solicited directly from an author—and 68% of those were written by women.

Historically, it stands up to prior years as follows:

We’ve always been off the norm for science fiction magazines, but last time the balance shifted like this, we took some flack. You have to keep in mind that slush pile data is quantitative, so it doesn’t cleanly map to a qualitative process like selecting stories for publication. This data suggests that women were better at sending us the type of stories we were looking for this year.

One thing I noticed was that about half of our female contributors had sold stories to us before and most of the male authors were new to Clarkesworld. While it would be nice if our male regulars were more active, overall I can’t complain about the quality of the stories we are receiving.

Note: Genre identification was done by the author at the time of submission. I’m not going to get into the “what is real SF?” fight.

Overall, men were more likely to write science fiction, women were more likely to write fantasy and horror was extremely male-dominated. There wasn’t anything unusual when compared to other years.

Some other miscellaneous slush pile nuggets:

Men favor submitting stories on Monday/Tuesday

Women favor Tuesday/Wednesday

Saturday is everyone’s least favorite day to submit a story

We received 929 submissions in August 2013 (new record)

We rejected 920 submissions in July 2013 (new record)

Social Media

Most of our marketing efforts are centered on social media. At the moment we have 6603 likes on our Facebook Page and 9872 followers on Twitter. While Twitter doesn’t share data with us, Facebook does provide some demographic information about the people that like our page:

In June 2012, we had 3500 likes and women made up 33.5% of that population. We’ve picked up more than 3000 new likes in the last year and it appears that our male Facebook audience is growing faster than our female Facebook audience. Facebook claims that 55% of their users are male, so that doesn’t seem unreasonable. The current numbers line up nicely with our submissions data as well.

As you can see in the above chart, the majority of Facebook audience falls between the ages of 25 and 54, with the largest concentration between 35 and 44. Overall, there doesn’t appear to be a connection between gender and age. Given that Facebook’s largest community of users are between the ages of 18 and 24, it would appear that we aren’t connecting as well with that group. Without further research, we have no way of determining whether or not this indicates a lack of interest on their part or a marketing problem on ours. It is certainly worth looking into.

Around the World

One of the advantages of publishing a digital magazine is international distribution. People from all over the world read or listen to our stories, but where are they? Facebook claims our top five countries are: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Our website statistics indicate that our web-based readers are from USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, China and 191 other countries, 9% of which use browsers with languages set to something other than English. Libsyn, the service that hosts our podcast files, claims that our top five countries USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and China. The big surprise in this year’s data was discovering Iran in sixth place among podcast downloads.

Reading

According to a very conservative interpretation of our web statistics, Clarkesworld has an average online readership of approximately thirty-three thousand.

Our podcast has between six and seven thousand listeners per month and each story picks up at least another two-to-three thousand listeners over the next eleven months.

Two thousand seven hundred readers are paid subscribers to our ebook editions at Weightless Books and Amazon. Our iPad, iPhone and Android apps just launched in October, so they’ll count into next year’s data.

All of these groups are likely to have some overlap with one another, so I use the thirty-three thousand number as the safe estimate of our overall readership. Some other quick facts about our readers and their habits are:

December is the month with the lowest average daily readership.

September was the highest.

60% of the visitors to our website are using Windows, 20% Mac, 11% IOS, and 7% Android.

Chrome is the browser of choice for most of you, taking a 35% share with Firefox (24%), Safari (19%), and IE (10%) following behind.

For podcasts—iTunes dominates with over 50%. Nothing else is even close to competing.

Business Data

Only about 8% of our readers have paid subscriptions.

0.5% donate any amount.

Despite those low numbers, these are the people that keep Clarkesworld afloat. Our other revenue streams—advertising, the annual anthologies, print issues, etc.—contribute to the bottom line, but in-total, they only covered the expense of a single issue.

I’ve mentioned a few of our goals in past editorials. This is what it would take to accomplish them:

To add that long-awaited fourth story in each issue, we need to convince another 1% of our online readership to subscribe.

When 15% of our current readers have subscribed, our staff pay will reach the level where Clarkesworld will become my full-time job.

I don’t doubt that some people will try to use these numbers to demonstrate how awful giving away free content is for business, but that ignores the inherent marketing value it provides to Clarkesworld and our authors. I won’t pretend that it isn’t just the tiniest bit frustrating, but it isn’t unexpected and I continue to have faith in this business model.

So that’s a quick look at the numbers for last year. If people are interested in getting more details or discussing what I’ve shared, I’d be happy to have that discussion in the comments area on our website. Next month, I plan to continue talking about what it takes to produce an issue of Clarkesworld. Numbers alone will never give you the whole picture.

6 Comments

Michael wrote on November 2nd, 2013 at 11:43 am:

This is great information. I'd really like to also know the author break down by nationality. I think Clarkesworld has had a huge role in drawing attention to non-western writers and that is why I'm always excited to see what you will publish next.

Thanks for the interesting numbers. Love your magazine. Have you ever thought about using crowd sourcing and a social network model like facebook or even youtube in order to grow your community? Instead of using a top down model of slush readers and editors you could have your authors post their stories on their own pages using a youtube or facebook type model. Other readers/members could then comment on and improve the stories and every month you could have your members vote for which stories to include in the issue. Not only would that save you all the slush reading time but it would get your writers a lot more involved in the editing and reading process, improve the quality of the stories , and create an interesting community of writers and readers that feel like they are a part of the magazine rather than just outside submitters or subscribers looking in. It would also increase traffic and revenue to your site as readers and writers constantly check their pages, add adsense advertising to their profiles and stories, and tailor content to what reader's enjoy and not just what editor's pick. Just a thought! Good luck with 2014!

Neil Clarke wrote on December 27th, 2013 at 3:35 pm:

Hi Jibrail,

While I can see why that model might appeal to some, the idea of posting stories for consideration in a public forum has some significant consequences for the participating authors. Most magazines want "first rights" which essentially means the story hasn't been posted or published previously. By participating in your model, all those authors would be giving up their first rights and, from then on, could only sell their stories as reprints. Reprints sell for considerably less than originals and many publications are closed to them.

That alone is a significant disincentive for more experienced authors and they aren't people you want to drive away. (We want a mix of new and experienced authors.)

Thanks for your response to my comment. The 'first rights' issue is indeed a problem but one way around it would be to make the posting and editing part of the website a members-only workshop format. In other words it would not be open to the entire audience of the internet but you would have to sign in like facebook in order to access those pages. That should avoid the 'first electronic rights' problem. Additionally I believe (though correct me if I'm wrong) that most magazines don't consider stories that are still being workshopped and commented on and revised by readers and writers to be 'published' even if they are on the internet. A magazine site that follows such a format is http://www.grantvillegazette.com/submissions . The problem with this magazine though is that because it focuses only on stories for a particular series, not every writer is interested in participating in their workshop model. I was thinking though that a magazine that followed the same model but for all of speculative fiction would be pretty cool.

In terms of getting experienced writers to submit, you could always have SFWA members and established writers still submit to you directly. Or generally you could just have a different submission process for them. That should cut down your slush pile by quite a bit though!

Again just a thought! As is I think you run a great magazine and I hope it continues to be successful. Internet publishing is the future of fiction and I hope your magazine can continue to ride the wave to becoming number one in speculative fiction.

Have a great New Year!

Neil Clarke wrote on December 27th, 2013 at 4:55 pm:

Thanks for the thought, but I don't think it would move the magazine in the right direction. Our fiction process is turning out stories that I'm quite happy with and I don't think this would yield anything better.

Grantville took it's lead from Baen's Universe. Never understood why they bothered as I've heard far many more bad things about the process than good. It's one of the reasons the concept never spread further. (Yes, I know they have a small tight-knit community that loves it, but it isn't enough to overcome the negatives.)

By the way, managing a forum is actually more frustrating and time-consuming than reading a few bad stories. Been there. Never going back. (Still have nightmares.) That said, making the forum private would solve your first rights problem, assuming the forum was run workshop-style and only included participating writers.

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Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a eight-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His latest anthology, The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.